User blog:Michboon/Finishing Gadgeteer and other hardware for the week
Gadgeteer Continuing on from last week I started this week with trying to get the WiFi working with Gadgeteer. A shout out to the Occupancy OS group (http://occupancy2013.wordpress.com/) who gave me a hand with getting this working. It turns out that the code is slightly different from the code over at http://wiki.tinyclr.com/index.php?title=WiFi_RS21_Module which I was previously trying to use. So with Gadgeteer now on the WiFi I worked on getting together some modules to interact with our system. Now I’m aware that I’ve moaned a fair bit in the past about Gadgeteer on this blog but today’s blog is going to be a welcome change and I’ve had a good week with it. After working with the Arduino for the previous week I can really see the appeal of the Gadgeteer stuff for our project now. Where in the past I’ve struggled to find much in the way of examples I found some quite nice ones this week which worked well. I was able to get the Gadgeteer accepting http requests for commands and making them on state changes fairly easily. The thing about Gadgeteer that I can now really appreciate is the lack of fiddling with wires, resistors and shared pins etc. It was great to be able to just plug the modules in and drag and drop them in the interface. This is something that was really unappreciated from before I used Arduino! I now have a working light sensor, PIR and button which all interact correctly with our system and the interface. I then went on to make the middle layer for them. Other Hardware This week I also met up with Denis Timm to get some help with making some of the previous hardware permanent. He was really good and gave us a lot of help, including a quick lecture on electronics which was cool. He then gave us a quick session on soldering and let us use the workshop whilst he made a case from scratch for the big red button. He’s even made us special things to plug our light bulbs in for testing and has taken some of our hardware home to tinker with so that we can use portable chargers instead of plugging them into the mains. He’s not an official part of our module but he’s given up a lot of his time for us and it’s really appreciated by our whole team. LightwaveRF This week we also got our hands on our final bits of hardware – The LightwaveRF parts (http://www.lightwaverf.com/). I haven’t started work on these properly yet and I’ve only done a bit of research. I’ve had a look around for an API to interact with them and couldn’t find anything official so it looks like we’ll have to work from http://code.google.com/p/lightwaverf-openapi/ which will be just as good but will just take more time. I emailed them asking for the API document which they mentioned on twitter they could hand out (https://twitter.com/LightwaveRF/status/298100763618586627) but I was asked to fill out an application for it. This seems a bit unnecessary since so many people have figured it out with Wireshark already. I’ll be using the freely available information instead over the next week. Category:Blog posts